A task of mapping a traffic stream onto a physical topology of a network is called traffic engineering TE. TE is a powerful tool for balancing traffic load between different links, routers and switches in the network so that all such devices are made full use of but are not overused. In this way, resources of the whole network can be used efficiently.
To ensure tunnel security in a network, an ingress node equipped with traffic engineering needs to detect a fault quickly in order to perform timely operations for ensuring TE security. There are two main modes of detecting faults of a TE tunnel in the prior art. One mode directly relies on a soft state refresh mechanism of a Resource Reservation Protocol (Resource Reservation Protocol, RSVP), and it is deemed that a fault occurs once message timeout is discovered, and then a fault notification is sent to the ingress node of the TE tunnel; and the other mode is to configure other detection technologies such as a bidirectional forwarding detection (Bidirectional Forwarding Detection, BFD) technology in the network to detect tunnel faults.
As regards the fault notification sent after a fault is discovered, the fault notification is based on each tunnel in the prior art. When numerous tunnels exist at the same fault point, numerous fault notification packets arise, which may lead to congestion of fault notifications, increase risks of losing or delaying fault notification packets, and hence delay processing for the faulty tunnel.